Data from high throughput experiments often produce far more results than can ever appear in the main text or tables of a single research article. In these cases, the majority of new associations is often archived either as supplemental information in an arbitrary format or in publisher-independent databases that can be difficult to find. These data are not only lost from scientific discourse, but are also elusive to automated search, retrieval and processing. Here, we use the nanopublication model to make scientific assertions that were concluded from a workflow analysis of Huntington’s Disease data machine-readable, interoperable, and citable. We followed the nanopublication guidelines to semantically model our assertions as well as their provenance metadata and authorship. We demonstrate interoperability by linking nanopublication provenance to the Research Object model. These results indicate that nanopublications can provide an incentive for researchers to expose mass data that is interoperable and machine-readable.

Eleni Mina, Mark Thompson, Rajaram Kaliyaperumal, Jun Zhao, Krisina Hettne, Erik Schultes, Marco Roos

Full publication: Paper for SWAT4LS 2013, Semantic Web Applications and Tools for Life Sciences, Edinburgh, UK, December 9–12 2013